I’m not a fan of Walmart and have long refused to shop at their stores. This is based on their terrible history of how they have treated their employees. I realize that this doesn’t make a dent in their bottom line, but I can’t support a company has a history of making employees skip meal breaks, skip rest breaks and work off the clock among other things.
So as a result I’m always happy when we get a call from a Walmart injured worker because it’s a company I love to go against.
Most of these claims are outside of the Chicago area because until recently there were no Walmart’s in Chicago. But I work with a team of lawyers throughout Illinois that has a track record of winning cases against the giant retailer.
Many Walmart workers wrongly believe that getting benefits against their company will be impossible. While it is a multi billion dollar company, they have to follow the same Illinois work comp laws as everyone else.
The biggest myth about these cases is that because the company is so big, they will have a team of lawyers to fight the case. While they do hire good law firms to defend them, work comp cases aren’t worth enough money to hire a team of lawyers. In other words, if your case is worth $50,000.00, they aren’t going to pay a bunch of lawyers $30,000.00 to fight it. No company does that. They do hire a good firm and that firm will assign one attorney to fight your case.
So while there can be a fight, that’s true in every Illinois work injury case.
The one thing that Walmart does do from our experience is try to get employees to take low ball settlement offers for less than there case is worth. That’s their right and the way to beat this is to simply take the case to trial or get it ready for trial. When they know your lawyer is serious they will come with their best offer. And if their best offer isn’t good enough then we’ll get you what’s fair after a short Arbitration.
Because there are so many employees at Walmart you see just about every injury imaginable with their workers. The most common is a back injury from lifting and it’s usually workers in the warehouse that have this problem. But you also see a lot of slip and falls, shoulder injuries from overhead lifting, falls off ladders, forklift accidents and many repetitive trauma claims.
The other really big myth with Walmart is that lawyers are afraid to fight them. I can promise you that is 100% false. Like I said, we love cases against them and at the end of the day it’s not much different than taking on any other big employer. I can never promise a result in a case, but do guarantee we’ll do everything we can to help you.
If you’d like to discuss a possible work injury case against Walmart, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
